8 Jun
2006
8 Jun
'06
2:10 a.m.
On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 22:43 -0500, Jan Depner wrote:
They may not have used OSS. It's possible that
they wrote their
own drivers for audio. Personally, I'm all in favor of anyone using
Linux for audio in any form or fashion. Of course, I hope that they
built upon the work that has been done before by the people involved
in ALSA and JACK but I can be magnanimous about it. The best case
scenario is that they open source everything they've been doing but I
can live with closed packages on top of Linux as long as it promotes
the use of Linux in audio as opposed to Micro$oft. We both know that
Linux is a far superior solution for audio, the more the "unwashed
masses" see Linux as "the" solution for audio the closer we are to
unseating the reigning king (HA) of operating systems. "The enemy of
my enemy is my friend" and, trust me, there is no greater enemy to you
and me and free software than Micro$oft.
Sure, I am not an ideologue - closed packages are acceptable in
userspace. Drivers are part of the kernel however so closed drivers are
a violation of the GPL. (Nvidia is probably legal because they use the
same binary blob as the windows drivers so it is not a derived work of
the kernel). But if they developed the drivers for this system, the GPL
requires them to release the source.
In case it was not clear, my original reply only referred to the driver
source, they are under no obligation to open source anything else.
Lee